ChrisReid said:
You've ignored my points and gone off on a tangent here. I've explained the ridiculous nature of this AO rating in step by step detail. You're replying to that with irrelevant anecdotes here and it doesn't change anything.
No, I haven't gone off on a tangent here - you have, about two posts ago
. As I've already said (how many times must I say this?), it's not about sense. It's not about the ratings system being consistent. As you yourself have said, the AO rating is political - San Andreas got it not because it was ultraviolent and such, but rather because it got itself into a pseudo-scandal about a hidden sex mini-game, which had the potential to seriously hurt the games industry unless the ESRB would bow and upgrade the rating to AO.
That's what we're talking about, and anyone who doesn't find that surprising is crazy or just doesn't understand what we're talking about.
But that's my point exactly - anyone who
does find it surprising is crazy. They (the anti-games activists) couldn't make any noise about this game right off the bat, because it was no more extreme than the previous games in the series. But once an excuse ("they're hiding stuff in the game to corrupt your teenage kids!!!") appeared, the effect was inevitable - the anti-games activists who
had to watch this particular game closely immediately started making noise, and the ESRB
had to revise the rating, because the ESRB is an industry organisation that ultimately is there to serve the industry, and they sure as hell ain't gonna say "well, gee, we're not going to upgrade it to AO, because there's a dozen other games out there that include sex nudity and violence, and we'd have to upgrade their ratings too." They had to do it to fob off the activists. And this
all was easily predictable to anyone who's paid any attention to how the anti-gaming movement and the media in general have reacted to various computer games over the past ten years.
And that's all I've been trying to say - not that this stuff was left in the game through malicious intent, but simply that it was an incredibly stupid thing to do. And, while indeed it is impossible to prove, I find it very hard to believe that this was unintentional stupidity - it just seems ludicrous that someone might be so naive that they would decide to disable this content in the game and then not give a second thought to the idea that the disabled will be found immediately after the release. Far more likely to me, it seems, is that the decision that was made was to cut the content out of the game completely - and someone stupidly decided to go against that decision.